The 1926 Miami hurricane
Monday, April 6, 2009 at 3:59PM Some idiot on the radio this morning was talking about the Miami real estate bust and how lucky we'd be if we got hit with a hurricane this summer, since insurance companies would pay out on totaled homes, thus lifting the burden of mortgages off the backs of many who are facing foreclosure. Time for a history lesson...
1926 had not been a good year for South Florida. A wild real-estate boom had collapsed.
Millionaires at the end of 1925 had become poor folks by the middle of 1926. Solid citizens skipped monthly payments and tax bills - and lost their homes. Businesses failed.
The sun still shone, but its rays bounced off the bleaching skeletons of unfinished buildings. Where had the good times of the Roaring '20s gone?
Oh, well, thought battered Floridians, things couldn't get worse.
And then they did, on Sept. 18, 1926.
From out of the Caribbean a storm, described by the U.S. Weather Bureau in Miami as "probably the most destructive hurricane ever to strike the United States," hit Fort Lauderdale, Dania, Hollywood, Hallandale and, most viciously of all, Miami.
In the storm's eerie darkness, winds as high as 150 miles per hour, resulting in the deaths of between 325 and 650 people. More than 800 others were never accounted for. Property damage was the worst in U.S. history, at that time.
Striking some 25 years before hurricanes were named, the 1926 storm became known in South Florida simply as The Hurricane or The Big Blow, a ghoulish honor it held until Andrew struck on Aug. 24, 1992.
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